Wednesday, January 01, 2014

The Fraudulent Frankenstein of Islam

Thesis:
Islam is a Frankenstein-like creature sewn together from the body parts of
other religions, a monster composed of reanimated dead limbs, torso, and head,
bent on murder and conquest to remake the world in its own self-acknowledged
ugly image. Who created it? Not some ambitious woman recording and developing her nightmare
into a Gothic novel, not some evil scientist, and not even Mohammad. Rather, it
is a totalitarian horror patched together by successive generations of
cackling, malevolent mystics and haters of life stretching back twelve
centuries.

Two
books were published over the last year that contribute in no small way to
exposing Islam not only as a pernicious and viral ideology, but as a fraud
perpetrated on countless Muslims and on the West.They are Norbert G. Pressburg's Whatthe Modern Martyr Should Know:
Seventy-Two Grapes and Not a Single Virgin,* originally published in
Germany in 2009 as Goodbye
Mohammed but revised for a wider market, and Ibn Warraq's Sir Walter
Scott's Crusades & Other Fantasies.** Both books subject Islam to
the intellectual and scholarly equivalent of night vision devices (NVD's) to
reveal what really lurks in ambush in the dark green jungle of Islam.

The
following comments do not pretend to be comprehensive reviews of the books, but
are intended to serve as recommendations and enticements to read the books.

What the Modern Martyr Should
Know helps to reveal
the bitter, psychotic flummery in the Koran
and Islam. Pressburg presents a very persuasive argument that the Koran and its companion works, chiefly
the Hadith, were and still are
works-in-progress, put together from disparate sources by Islamic myth-builders
who may as well have worked as skit-writers for Saturday
Night Live.

Pressburg
addresses such questions as: Did Mecca actually exist? What is the true history
of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem? How impossible was it for Islam to
conquer the Arabian Peninsula and a goodly square mileage of the Middle East,
and also Persia and Egypt, in less than a century? Did Christians and Jews
really thrive under Islamic "tolerance" in Muslim Spain? Do the abrogated,
earlier verses of the Koran play any
role in the propagation and proselytizing of Islam today? In which century did
anyone note the irruption of Islam from Arabia?

…There is no scientific evidence
about invasions and the capture of Syria, Persia, or Egypt by Muslims during
these time periods. That is because the establishing of the Arabian Empire was
not a result of Islam – the empire had been there already. Only due to its
existence was the exhaustive spread of Islam possible. Hence, the conquests of
the first two hundred years under the green banner of the Prophet are
nonexistent….(p. 146)

And that Arab "empire"
was fundamentally Christian, a functioning political and religious legacy of
the Byzantine era. In short, Islam's doctrine takes credit for another
historical phenomenon, with which it had little or nothing to do with Islam's
influence on the course of events in the Mideast and Northern Africa between
the eighth and twelfth centuries.

The birth of Islam and the
creation of its Holy Book did not happen overnight. And Islam certainly didn't
spread over half of the ancient world within just a few years, [as Islam's]
religious legends are trying to tell us. The history of Islam is long and
twisted. It originated from the Arabic Christendom, [which] split off from
Judaism, and Islam split off from Christendom. Signs of the coming separation
were visible during the sixth and seventh centuries. The separation took place
in the eighth and ninth centuries….The creation and establishment of what we
refer to as Islam today was not completed before the twelfth or even the
thirteenth century….(pp. 147-148)

The
Hadith, contends Pressburg – and I'm
sure few other scholars and students of Islam would disagree – was a collection
of invented or tongue-in-cheek anecdotes about Mohammad's life. Pressburg
quotes some twenty-seven Hadiths to
show just how nonsensical and bizarre the majority of them are. Such as:

IV, 6 Narrated [by] Abu Ayyub
al-Ansari, who said the messenger of God had told him:

"When relieving yourselves,
your faces or backs must not face the Ka'ba, but rather turn west or
east."

XXXIV, 15 Narrated [by] Abu
Huraira:

"The Prophet said: 'The evil
eye is reality.' And he banned getting tattoos."

XXVI, 7 Narrated [by] Abu Sa'ID
al-Khudri:

The Prophet said to the women:
"Is it not true that the testimony of a woman is only worth half of that
of a man?" They replied: "Yes, oh messenger of God." – "The
reason for that is your intellectual deficiencies."

Manufacturing
Hadiths, centuries after Mohammad's
time, apparently became a cottage industry, almost a contest to see who could
come up with the most imaginative and inane pseudo-anecdotal incidents in
Mohammad's life and the blandest things this intellectually deficient brute
could possibly have said.

Hundreds of thousands of Hadiths were written down at least two
hundred years after the alleged events….During the ninth century, a real Hadith-producing industry evolved.
Hadiths were made to order and for money. People in power had Hadiths produced that would legitimize
their positions. A certain al-Auja admitted to having made up four thousand Hadiths. Despite the fact that he was
executed for this, the problem of forged Hadiths
remained….According to conservative estimates, there are around 1.5 million Hadiths….(p. 48)

It
was interesting to learn that aKoran existed over a century before Mohammad was born in 570 A.D.,
that it was a Syrian Christian liturgical work, and that the Islamic Koran, which was supposedly dictated
whole and "perfect" by an angel to an illiterate brigand in a
semi-comatose state, is largely a work of fiction written by minds as malignant
and corrupt as Charles Manson's or Hannibal Lector's. However, its collation,
writes Pressburg, didn't begin until at least two centuries after Mohammad's
death in 632 A.D., and even then it had to be continually corrected and
expanded to resolve contradictions and to fill in gaps in doctrine and to
account for historical conflicts and anomalies. The task of creating and
developing the Koran and the life of Mohammad
was much like a movie treatment handed to a succession of Hollywood hack
screenwriters, except that it took centuries, not mere years, to complete the
end product.

The
chief value of Pressburg's book is that the author performs the important task
of examining the linguistic roots of the Koran's
language, showing that it was not written in Arabic (or "Qur'anic' Arabic"),
as Islamic clerics claim, but in a mixture of Aramaic, Greek, and local
dialects, and cadged heavily from contemporary Hebrew and Christian doctrines
and documents. "Allah," after all, was originally a pagan deity,
Allat, a moon goddess of fertility. Pressburg draws extensively on Christoph
Luxenberg's The
Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran (2009) to bolster his argument that
in no way could Islamic clerics claim that the Koran was originally written in Arabic, because the language, at
that time, was not sophisticated enough to accommodate what would eventually
become the written Koran we know
today.

Pressburg
also traces the architecture, coins, tablets, and monuments of the period, much
of which, while created in the Arabian period, bear Christian, Byzantine, or
semi-pagan styles, symbols and markings. They have nothing to do with Islam.
Until the Muslim hordes burst out of Arabia on campaigns of conquest, Pressburg
writes that Islam was little known before the tenth century (Mohammad purportedly
died in 632 A.D.). There was virtually no mention of a fanatical religion being
spread by scimitar and spear or of Islam or of a "Prophet" in
contemporary chronicles or in debates or discussions by writers and political
figures until the end of the twelfth century. One would have thought that the
depredations of such an "invincible" nemesis would have given Islam's
alleged contemporaries and enemies grave pause for thought. Islam's aggressions
and atrocities ought to have been "headline news" in the previous
centuries. Why weren't they? Pressburg provides convincing arguments for why
not.

The
downside of What the Modern Martyr Should
Know, translated from the German, is that apparently no serious attempt was
made to line-edit the text by the author's middlemen. It contains scores of
typographical, spelling, punctuation, and formatting errors. Publication of the
English language edition ought to have been delayed until they had been
corrected. Pressburg's book deserved better treatment.

The
"Seventy-Two Grapes" in the subtitle, by the way, refers to the
linguistic confusion over what is promised to Islamic suicide bombers, martyrs,
and other jihadis once they arrive in
Muslim Paradise. Pressburg cites Christoph Luxenberg's analysis of several abstruse
and ambiguous passages in the Koran,
including the promise of six dozen renewable virgins or houris ("heavenly maidens") to Allah's
"warriors":

In using Qur'anic as well as
non-Qur'an'anic sources, Luxenberg was able…to show that the alleged
"white ones" [houris with
big eyes] in the Paradise-related passages undoubtedly refer to grapes. The
Syro-Aramaic word in, which is
unknown in Arabic, means "crystal-clear, shiny, splendid, jewel-like
appearance" in Aramaic. That means that hur in does not refer to any creature or person – certainly not to
any houris – but rather, refers to shiny, jewel-like grapes. (pp. 16-17)

From
that, Luxenberg's translation of Sura 44:54, in its original form, "…and
shall wed them [the believers] with houris
that have big eyes," actually means, "We will provide a comfortable
place for them under the jewel-like grapes."

One
can't help but wonder if so many Muslims would be in such a rush to die with
their slain infidels if they knew what their Holy Book actually promised them
in the afterlife. Grapes? That's it? Paradise isn't an eternal combination of Studio 54 and a houri-house? Never mind. I'd rather herd
sheep.

Pressburg
performs some of his most vital work in Chapter 5, "Two Hundred Years of
Silence: The Historic Muhammad" (pp. 71-94). For example, about the name Mohammad, or Mohammed: It would have been difficult for the brigand that carries
his name to have been "christened" with it when it wasn't even a
proper name. Pressburg writes:

With the Marwanids (in 682 A.D.)
came also the muhamad. The term muhamad occurs first on al-Malik's
coins. According to traditional interpretations, it of course, refers to the
Prophet Muhamad. The facts, however,
tell a different story. As Christoph Luxenberg clearly shows, muhamad certainly does not represent an
individual's name. In Arabic, as well as in Syro-Aramaic, the latter of which
was the main language at that time, this term denotes a gerund [meaning]
"The One Who Is to Be Praised" or "the Praised One." Muhamad was a title, not a name. The muhamad-logo is found in many places. It
was created in Persia….

The same applies to the
frequently used expression abd Allah,
which means "God's servant" and serves as a modifier, not a name. To
the Arabian Christians, the name for God had always been Allah; and [so] this term hasn't got anything to do with the
Islamic Allah. (pp. 79-80)

Pressburg
turns to one mute authority on which to base his contention and also
Luxenberg's: the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, number
three of Islam's holiest sites.

Ibn
Warraq tackles a different realm of Islamic falsity and myth-making.

Warraq's
nonpareil and highly readable essays can also be found on the New English Review
site, here.

His
Sir Walter Scott's Crusades & Other
Fantasies dwells largely on the fascination Western writers, historians,
and thinkers have had with Islam, a fascination which conflicted with the
realities of Islam and with recorded historical fact. Warraq focuses on four of
Scott's Waverly novels, The Betrothed,
Count Robert of Paris, Ivanhoe and The Talisman, the latter set during the Third Crusade and which
pits the Christian crusaders against Saladin and the Saracens.

In
Sir Walter Scott's Crusades, Warraq
also discusses the plight and fate of Jews and Christians under Islamic rule in
different periods of history, the persecution of Jews in Western Europe and by
crusaders enroute to the Mideast, and the recent policy of self-censorship in
the wake of Muslim mayhem and its threat over the representation of Mohammad in
print and in the media, together with the alleged "misrepresentation"
of Islam and Muslims by journalists and the news media, a policy which inhibits
or suppresses any provable and obvious connection between Islam and Islamic
terror.

Warraq
deftly distinguishes between the brutal and doctrinal reality of Islam and what
its Western defenders imagined it to be, especially in the person of Saladin, a
major character in Scott's The Talisman,
a sympathetic character who towers over the conflicted and almost uniformly
grungy characters of the crusaders he is fighting. Warraq highlights the fact
that the seeds of today's political and moral relativism, which allows Western
politicians, intellectuals, and media to ignore the nature and record of Islam,
were planted in 19th century literature, such as Scott's novels that
dealt with the Crusades.

He
speculates on whether or not Scott knew he was painting a fraudulent,
"romantic" picture of Islam and of Saladin. He cites contemporary
chronicles that reveal the Saracen leader in less than flattering terms, and
not the magnanimous, sagacious, and humane Moslem warrior who pardoned his
captured enemies, but as a cruel, sadistic brute who regularly made a show of slitting
their throats or beheading prisoner crusaders and even ordering the slaughter
of 50,000 defenseless Sudanese soldiers, once his military allies, in Cairo in
1169.

Sir Walter Scott, under the
influence of the Scottish historian William Robertson, who had perpetuated the
Enlightenment myth of the superiority of Islamic civilization, continued the
theme of the vain and avaricious Christian Crusaders in contrast to the chivalrous
and honorable Saracens. (p. 16)

Scott,
writes Warraq, although committed to "religious and racial tolerance, and
his Enlightenment abhorrence of superstition and fanaticism, whether of the
unreflective kind of the masses, or the more dogmatic variety of the religious
bigot," subscribed to an inverse bias which reflected a weakness for the superstition
of Islamic superiority and a dogmatic penchant for cultural bigotry – in favor
of Islam.

In
The Talisman, Saladin is depicted as
an idealistic individual, uninterested in booty, blood shedding, forcibly
converting infidels to Islam under pain of death, or conquest, but instead as a
colorful, tolerant, and almost selfless character devoted to the allegedly high
"ideals" and ethical standards of Islam. He is imbued with the
virtues heretofore reserved to the European Age of Chivalry. Saladin is
projected as a near compatriot of St. Francis of Assisi. However, writes Warraq
in his chapters on Ivanhoe:

Scott, though often considered a
respectable historian, is quite cavalier with the historical facts in Ivanhoe, or as A.N. Wilson [a British
writer and newspaper columnist] put it, "wildly inaccurate. Scott himself
admits the unhistorical nature of many of the details in a footnote, "…but
neither will I allow that the author of a modern antique romance is obliged to
confine himself to the introduction of those manners only which can be proved
to have absolutely existed in the times he is depicting, so that he restrain
himself to such as are plausible and natural, and contain no obvious
anachronism." (p. 17)

On
the subject of forced conversions to Islam, which Scott may or not have been
aware of, Warraq quotes from The Talisman
a pair of Saladin's fictional speeches, written to cast a heroic aura around
the Mohammadan leader:

Saladin makes no converts to the
law of the Prophet, save those on whom is precepts shall work convictions. Open
thine eyes to the light, and the great Soldan, whose liberality is as boundless
as his power, may bestow on these a kingdom; remain blinded if thou wilt, and,
being one whose second ife is doomed to misery, Saladin will yet, for this span
of present time, make these rich and happy. But fear not that thy brows shall
be bound with the turban, save at thine own free choice. (p. 63)

And:

Have I not told these that
Saladin desires no converts saving those whom the holy prophet shall dispose to
submit themselves to his law – violence and bribery are alike alien to his plan
for extending the true faith. (pp. 63-64)

Warraq
then counters this fictional portrait of Saladin with quotations from Saladin's
own biographer, Bahā al-Din Ibn Shaddad (1145-1234), "who was permanently enrolled
in the service of the Sultan in 1188, and for the rest of Saladin's life was his
intimate and close confidant…."

[A]…[A] Frank [a Christian crusader]
who had been taken prisoner was brought before him [Saladin]. He ordered his
head to be cut off, which was done in his preence, after the man had been
offered Islam and had rejected it.

[B] [Saladin once ordered his son,
al-Malike al-Zahir, lord of Aleppo to execute a young man that came forward…of
whom it was said that he rejected the Holy Law and declared it invalid. His son
had arrested him because of reports about him that he heard. He informed the
sultan [Saladin] of this, who ordered his execution and his body to be publicly
displayed for some days. This was done.

[C] [After the Battle of Hattin, July
1187, Saladin summons the prisoner Prince Reynald of Châtillon] He said to him,
"Here I am having asked for victory through Muhammad, and God has given me
victory over you." He offered him Islam but he refused. The sultan then
drew his scimitar and struck him, severing his arm at the shoulder. Those present
finished him off….(pp. 64-65)

Elsewhere
in his book, Warraq discusses the fact that representations of Mohammad are
common in Islamic and Western art, the treatment of Jews by Saladin and the crusaders,
Saladin's bloody political intrigues (he was Sultan between 1174 and 1193 in
conflict with other Muslim leaders and groups), the perceptions of Jews and Islam
by prominent writers in the 19th century, such as George Eliot, John
Stuart Mill, and Mark Twain, and the rare thinker who saw through the
romanticized view of Islam and Islamic rule for the despotism it actually was, particularly
in the Ottoman Empire.

Warraq
ends his book by moving to our own time to discuss the delusional policy of
treating Islam and its repressive culture as beyond moral judgment, or as actions
to not risk taking by criticizing Islam
in scholarly works or in satire lest Muslims be "offended" or
"insulted" ("pre-emptive censorship, or self-censorship). Here he
dwells on Barack Obama's blatantly pro-Islam policies, the South Park "Mohammad in a bear costume" capitulation, and
other craven surrenders to Islamic extortion via riots and street
demonstrations and in the culture at large. He calls for a stand by the West to
reject Islam's "holy law" about criticizing Islam, and quotes Kenan
Malik, a board member of the Index on Censorship:.

Once we accept that it is
legitimate to censor that which is 'unnecessary' or 'gratuitous,' then we have
effectively lost the argument for free speech. (p. 242)

"Unnecessary"
and "gratuitous" as defined by whom? By Islam, and by Islam's hapless
Western dhimmis in the courts and in
the culture, and by killers otherwise known as Islamic suicide bombers and
other jihadis. Warraq cites Daniel
Pipes' The Legal Project (I would
also include The Lawfare Project)
as a means to spotlight incursions on freedom of speech,

Warraq
concludes his book on a Gunga Din note,
sounding a warning about the trap Westerners are marching into.

A firm declaration in support of
artists in whatever medium would send a clear message to all Islamic, yes, Islamic,
terrorists, and easily offended Muslims that we are proud of our values, and we
will defend them at all costs, and that we shall not be terrorized….Unless we
show greater solidarity, massive, public, noisy solidarity and show that we
care for our freedoms, we risk losing all to Islamist thuggery. (pp. 243-245)

Speaking
of fiction, one can view Islam in another way, as well. In contrast to The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic hoax perpetrated and proselytized
by forgers, the credulous, and the ignorant, the Muslim Brotherhood's 1991
"Explanatory
Memorandum: On the General Strategic Goal in North America" can be
viewed as an appendix to "The Protocols of the Long-Dead Elders of Islam,"
evidenced, documented, and demonstrated daily by the Islamic jihad against the West, whilst
conforming to the totalitarian nature of Islam, and constitutes a very genuine
and provable conspiracy to conquer the world.

Islam
is a savage, fraudulent monster lumbering and lurching in our midst, destroying everything
it touches. Only the torches and pitchforks of scholarly research and satire
can drive it away and over the cliff into the dustbin of history.

*Whatthe
Modern Martyr Should Know: Seventy-Two Grapes and Not a Single Virgin, by Norbert
G. Pressburg. 2012. Create Space, 2013.

2 comments:

Another "plus" for the Crusaders, mentioned by Warraq, is that they were not waging a war of conquest, as the Saracens were under Saladin. They went to the Mideast to reclaim Christianity's "holy sites." Saladin and his Muslim allies already controlled an area in Europe vastly larger than what the Crusaders did in Syria and Palestine.

For all the sympathy and interest I have for Christoph Luxenberg and others who debunk the Muslim version of early Islamic history, I have one objection. The Greek Christian theologian St. John of Damascus composed a list of heresies around AD 730. The hundredth and last heresy on his list was Islam. He reports quite accurately key Muslim tenets, such as refusal to eat pork or drink wine, and he even mentions female genital mutilation as a Muslim tenet, and this only 100 years after the death of the alleged Muhammad, whom St John calls "Mamed" in Greek.

So, assuming St John of Damascus can be believed, "Mamed" or Muhammad was well known in Syria around 730. St John does not say, however, that this heresy was held by his rulers, and the fact that he reports Islam as the hundredth and last of his heresies may indicate that it was not that important in Syria in 730.

Another interesting fact stems from coinage. Until around 700, coins minted in the supposedly Muslim Near East bore images and had, as Pressburg notes, a Byzantine appearance. This suddenly changes in the early 8th century. By around 720, all coins from the region including Syria, Egypt, today's Iraq, and Arabia are without images, according to Muslim teaching.

I conclude that Luxenberg may well be right about the origins of the Koran, and Pressburg partly right that the Muslim version of early Islam is fiction. However, coins and St John of Damascus indicate that something radical had happened in the Near East by the early 8th century.